JSConf Downunder in Sydney

JSConf.au is the first conference in Australia which is entirely dedicated to the language we love so much — JavaScript. It’s the latest in the growing family of JSConf conferences, started a little over four years ago in Washington D.C.

Chris Williams is the man accredited with the birth of JSConf. In 2009 he ran the first conference in Washington. It was a big deal; a technical conference running outside of Silicon Valley specifically focused on JavaScript, one of the defacto web technologies. It seemed unlikely that anything would really come of it, but fortunately that was not the case.

JSConf has grown from a single event running in the American capital to span the globe with events running in Europe, South America and now Australia. Each conference is run by the local JavaScript community, for the local JavaScript community, and they’re popular. Really popular! It’s no wonder when the fallout from previous events reverberates around the web for weeks and months after.

JSConf talks are technical, there’s no getting away from it. But for those bold enough to take it on, they are so very, very inspiring. And it’s not just the content. Conferences are run with interaction in mind. Round tables help foster discussions, develop ideas and generate friendships. The future of JavaScript is launched, conceived, and written at these conferences. So why has it taken so long for Australia to have one of these conferences.

Anyone who has spent some time in the Australian web scene knows we have something very special, and we don’t want to spoil that. We are working hard to do our namesake all the credit it deserves, but with a very Australian flavour and not just a pretty logo. We feel we have also put together a pretty stellar lineup. This is the first time these speakers have spoken in Australia!

The first cab off the rank is none other than Brendan Eich, who will be opening the conference with a secret keynote. If you want to get the lowdown on the past, present, and future of JavaScript, who better than the creator of JavaScript and the CTO of Mozilla?

If that is not enough to convince you, well, we also have Alex Sexton coming down. If you are a web developer there is a 100% chance you have used a project this man has worked on – JQuery, modernizr, yepnope and the organiser of TXJS. He will be chatting to us about a very real problem in modern web applications, internationalisation.

Alex will be describing the current pains, and will be showing us a library he has written to solve the problem. If it is anything like his previous work, this library will be included on every website in the near future.

For the node developers out there, we are bringing you the current Node.js head honcho, Isaac Schlueter. You may know of a little application that he wrote, NPM. Curious why Node.js made a huge change to the core by introducing the readable stream interface, all while maintaining backwards compatibility of the platform? Well, we certainly have the talk for you!

We don’t stop there, we have talks on Phonegap, the future of JavaScript and some very special local speakers to announce.

As mentioned, we are working very hard to bring all the magic of the JSConf family down under. This means a small event where you can be sure to have a conversation with every attendee, at one of the two awesome parties (yes, one day of JavaScript, two parties).

Last, but certainly not least, we’ve also managed to pry a coupon code to get you the early bird pricing. Simply use the coupon code ‘sitepoint’. How cool is that?!

I help people build websites and applications for the web. I'm involved in web standards with @whatwg & @w3c and I'm one of the JSConf.au organisers.

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